Perhaps tagging/social bookmarking is the key to the context, though?
Tagging is an interesting phenomenom - as this survey by Pew indicates. And I would split taggers into two groups:
- Creators / Uploaders tagging their own content (blog posts, wiki pages, photos, videos, soundfiles, etc).
- Users tagging other people's content.
I suspect that the first kind of tagging is relatively common - esp. with photos. Photos are non-textual (unlike blog posts) and yet do not have a standard set of metadata lying around for them (such as the artist, title, album set for songs) so if you want to retrieve them then some form of tag is bloody handy (for both you & your users).
Why people tag the content of others is a little different. I may want to find something again (but if it's a file, I'd probably download it). But I might also want to share it with others. The "social" bit in social bookmarking is critical. These systems work when groups of people want to share things with each other. And yet sites like YouTube have "share this with a friend" buttons that obviates the need for that. So the tedious business of tagging is often unnecessary. If the purposeful social connections aren't there between people, I can't see it working on a large scale inside the enterprise.
Going back to Simon's comment, I think you need a common social context before you can engage in collaborative tagging activities.
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> Photos are non-textual (unlike blog posts) and yet do not have a standard set of metadata lying around for them
There is the EXIF standard for photo metadata that's embedded in the pictures taken by most digital cameras. EXIF documents not only the camera make and model (and serial #!) but also the critical aspects of exposure: what mode, shutter, aperture, focal length, and so on are embedded and viewable in most cases (some people remove EXIF to keep the details of their craft private, which I disagree with doing). Some cameras and people using special software augment the EXIF with GPS coordinates so they can say where the photo was taken, with the time and date recorded by the camera itself. EXIF is becoming fairly rich for automated metadata collection.
That's the technical details, but when it comes to the 'aboutness' of the photo - its subject, its themes, then it's true that there are no set standards other than what the community evolves.
It seems to me that tagging is a practice that is in a dialectic with its community: it is shaped by the context of the community, and expresses it back to the world where it is again re-consumed and further shapes subsequent tagging events, much as natural language evolves.
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